In 2024, the year which the festival celebrates its 33rd edition, Guimarães Jazz finds itself, in the image of the musical genre that it represents, inevitably confronted with the circumstance of its own historical weight and of the advantages and disadvantages brought forth by this ballast when we consider new programming strategies. It is undeniable that numbers and statistics are useful in the task of synthesizing or understanding the past; however, considering that historical times are also made elements that are impossible to quantify, both categories prove more problematic and reductionist when used to take the pulse of the present or to anticipate the future. Specifically in the case of art and music, we might argue that its influence is measured to a great extent, rather, by the artist’s or the artistic work’s ability to create ripples in its ecosystem via frequencies that at first glance may seem invisible, but which decisively influence surface events. Guimarães Jazz’s reputation and vitality derive not only from the numbers that support its history, but from its ability to capture those influences and thus promote an immaterial relation between musicians and the audience in which other values beyond statistics are taken in consideration. This year, as it is always the case at Guimarães Jazz, the list of projects and artists presented – not necessarily the most famous or most favored by mainstream critics – was designed exclusively with the aim of preserving this pact of trust and, thus, defend the relevance of jazz in a context often marked by processes and discourses hostile to a musical genre that some consider obsolete and incapable of adapting to technological evolution.